View Full Version : Documentary stills, help please!!


Stephen Dougherty
May 25th, 2012, 08:03 PM
So I'm working on a documentary to be finished before the toronto film festival and while out collecting some memorial day themed B-Roll I had noticed my footage looked really... well.. odd. I can't for the life of me put my thumb on it, maybe you guys can tell from the still images.

http://i1058.photobucket.com/albums/t414/stephenjdougherty/ScreenShot2012-05-25at95837PM.jpg
http://i1058.photobucket.com/albums/t414/stephenjdougherty/ScreenShot2012-05-25at95813PM.jpg
http://i1058.photobucket.com/albums/t414/stephenjdougherty/ScreenShot2012-05-25at95739PM.jpg
http://i1058.photobucket.com/albums/t414/stephenjdougherty/ScreenShot2012-05-25at95711PM.jpg
http://i1058.photobucket.com/albums/t414/stephenjdougherty/ScreenShot2012-05-25at95526PM.jpg

Battle Vaughan
May 26th, 2012, 07:17 PM
It looks like a serious magenta shift in the color balance except in the frame with all the shrubs. Odd, that, because magenta "kills" green, but the greens there are very green. Maybe white balance was off kilter somewhere?

Allan Black
May 27th, 2012, 02:44 AM
Yes, are you custom white balancing each of those scenes. Maybe try some tests with, then just using the camera wb.

Cheers.

Adam Letch
May 27th, 2012, 07:10 PM
i found a anomoly when i first got the camera with stock lens, if you shoot with a Tiffen Polarizer and ND filter at same time, it turns everything with a magenta cast. Were you using filters?

Sareesh Sudhakaran
May 28th, 2012, 08:55 PM
Looks like the camera had a hard time with its white balance - was it manually set to tungsten in the shade?

If it was on auto WB, and you don't have issues in other situations, then your camera WB was probably thrown off track by the reflective metal.

Bob Hart
June 9th, 2012, 06:55 AM
Was there a lot of deep green temperate foliage and green spill onto subject which the camera's white balance might have been trying to adjust for.

I had a problem with deep green coastal scaevola groundcovers and low scrub on a beachside scene in which I had used a reflector - pure sunlight or so I thought, bounced off whiteboard onto the human subjects plus what was coming off the environment in the same direction towards the sun. The sun was getting lower and there was some dapple on the reflector. When I tried to grade it for better skin tones, I ended up with faint beetroot highlights. There was also a groundglass and two prisms in the optical path and I had initially thoight that was the cause.

Maybe try something counter-intuitive and toss even some more green in. The sky might go a bit weird though.

If you were using lots of ND, maybe even NDs in a mattebox on front, then a bit of near-infrared might have got in. This however is usually manifest as a sort of red ochre cast in the blacks.

Please listen to the opinions of those more competent that I who comment here.

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